What's the difference between reply_count and post_count?

data & reporting
1

Hi guys, I’m trying to get the topic count and reply count for the current logged in user, so I would like to check /session/current.json to get both.

topic_count returns what I’d expect, however reply_count is very different from post_count in /u/[username]/summary.json. At first I thought reply_count might just exclude the posts you make when starting a new topic, however in my case, the two counts are are 173 and 410 respectively—and the topic_count is 78. So if that was the case the reply_count should have been 332.

Could anyone explain the difference between these two metrics and which I should be using to get the actual reply count (which I define as total posts minus topics started)?

Thanks!

1 Like
2

The value of reply_count you get from /session/current.json is the count of posts the user has created in other users’ topics. To get the total number of posts a user has created, excluding the first post in each topic, use the post_count value from the user_summary section of /u/<username>/summary.json.

4 Likes
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Thanks, that makes sense then!

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